The Queen's Hidden Cousins, Channel 4, review

The Queen’s Hidden Cousins: Katherine Bowes-Lyon in the Royal Earlswood HospitalPhoto: Channel 4

By James Walton

10:05PM GMT 17 Nov 2011

These days, one of Channel 4’s few remaining links to its subversive past is that every now and then it finds room among its lifestyle, cookery and makeover shows to have a pop at the Royal family. In the circumstances, perhaps the biggest surprise about The Queen’s Hidden Cousins is that the channel had taken so long to get round to a story which first broke in 1987.

The cousins in question were Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, two of the children of the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother’s older brother John and his wife Fenella. Both girls were born with such severe mental handicaps that neither learned to talk — and in the charming language of the day they were officially diagnosed as “imbeciles”. (According to a programme always keen to stress upper-class heartlessness, this was particularly galling for the Bowes-Lyons because imbecility was mostly associated with the lower orders.)

On what seems to have been medical advice, the girls were sent to the Royal Earlswood asylum in 1941, when Nerissa was 22 and Katherine, 15.

Back in 1855, the Royal Earlswood had been impeccably philanthropic in intention: the first purpose-built institution for “idiots, imbeciles and the feeble-minded”. The former nurses who testified last night, though, painted a far bleaker picture.

We were told that life was pretty grim for all the inmates: regimented and devoid of fun. But it was especially miserable for Nerissa and Katherine. Apparently aware of their royal connections, they would curtsy or salute whenever their relatives appeared on television. Yet, according to the programme, nobody, not even their parents, ever visited or sent them Christmas cards or remembered their birthdays. In 1963 the family’s entry in Burke’s Peerage declared that both daughters were dead.

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This is clearly a tragic story. The trouble was that yesterday’s documentary never seemed entirely sure what to do with it. At times – and at its best – it used the fate of the Bowes-Lyon girls to illustrate the shocking way (to us) that people with learning disabilities were treated not so long ago. The relatives of Royal Earlswood inmates recalled how forbidding the place was. People who worked in other mental hospitals remembered the cruelty of the staff. (For the record, Royal Earlswood itself closed only in 1997 and is now, rather improbably, a luxury-flat complex.)

And yet of course, such thoughtful analysis alone was never going to allow for the desired Royal-bashing – and so was constantly elbowed aside in favour of something much cruder.For a start, at least one key fact was mysteriously withheld. One possible reason that John Bowes-Lyon never visited his daughters was that he died in 1930 — as I discovered only by Googling him later. And in any case, most of the blame was placed squarely on the Windsors. The tales of Katherine and Nerissa’s lonely plight were intercut with scenes of the Royal family all laughing together – as if the two things were directly linked. By the end, it would be hard to argue that Nerissa and Katherine — who is still alive – were treated well by their family. Nonetheless, by turning them into an excuse to launch another suspiciously gleeful attack on the Windsors, did Channel 4 really treat them any better?